Example embodiments pertain to gaming machine systems and processes, and, more particularly, to gaming machine systems and methods for enabling players to deposit one or more types of paper currency to wager and for monitoring associated gaming machine activity and for providing related gaming machine accounting data.
Traditionally, slot machines and other types of conventional gambling machines accepted and dispensed only coins. For these machines, the game monitoring and accounting are straightforward. Coin input by a player always becomes part of game activity, i.e., the player risks all of the coins he or she inserts into the machine. Therefore, game activity is monitored simply by tracking coin inflows and outflows for the machine. In addition, the change in the level of coins in a coin payout hopper, which is impractical to measure directly, can be inferred quite easily by subtracting the sum of the total game outflow and the total number of coins diverted to the game's drop bucket from the total number of coins inserted into the machine. Similarly, the calculation of game win percentage is given by the ratio of coin outflow to coin inflow.
Today, the increased sophistication of gaming machine technology has greatly increased player options. For example, gaming machines have been devised which can accept wagers in forms other than coins. For example, a gaming machine that is equipped with a bill acceptor or “validator” for accepting paper currency is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,113,990. Additionally, gaming machine technology has advanced to such a stage that it is now possible for gaming machines to accept items of monetary value in forms other than cash. As examples, cashless gaming machines available today include machines that accept bar coded coupons and video lottery machines that offer many games, often of various types, within a single cabinet and which pay winnings in the form of printed vouchers issued by the machine.
Most gambling casinos and other gaming locations contain a large number of gaming machines which typically accept as wagers one or more denominations of a paper currency issued by a given jurisdiction, such as U.S. dollars, and dispense winnings in the form of a printed voucher or, alternatively, from a coin payout hopper. Because there is an inflow of paper currency into such machines, it is important to check the authenticity of the currency and keep careful and accurate records of the value of any currency used to purchase credits for wagering, the wagers placed at the machine based on those credits, and game activity such as the total payout. Moreover, gambling regulatory commissions in many jurisdictions require casino operators to maintain very specific accounting data with regard to their gaming machines.
The new forms of wagering and payout instruments have complicated the machine accounting problem. For example, it is now possible for a player to insert U.S. dollar bills, for example, into a gaming machine and cash out immediately without placing any wager. In this case, the game credit purchased and cashed in by the player never becomes part of game activity. Consequently, because not all credits dispensed by the gaming machine are the result of game winnings, monitoring game activity is no longer a simple matter of tracing coin outflows and coin inflows which applied to coin slot machines in the past. Accordingly, the calculation of game win percentage must take into account “vended credits,” i.e., credits purchased but not risked.
The failure to account for vended credits means that game-win percentage calculations can be compromised when, for example, a bill acceptor is added to a coin gaming machine. In many such retrofit installations, when the gaming machine accepts paper currency in addition to coins from a player, a meter which counts coin inflows is incremented. Similarly, when the player cashes out, a meter which counts coin outflows is incremented. However, because the player can now collect the credits purchased without risking any of the credits in a wager, the coin outflow meter does not reflect actual game activity. Therefore, the traditional calculation of game win percentage based on the ratio of coin outflow to coin inflow is improperly inflated.
To further complicate the accounting problem, rules established by many gaming regulatory commissions require that all casinos and gaming locations account separately for all of the different forms of monetary value that can be accepted by modern gaming machines. Specifically, most regulatory commissions require a complete audit of all wagers found in the coin and paper currency cash boxes. In machines equipped with coupon readers, the paper currency box may contain bar coded coupons of varying amounts in addition to cash. Yet the gaming establishment's accounting system must provide an audit trail for each of these wagering instruments. In addition, the rules require a separate accounting of the different forms of machine payouts. For example, where machine payouts are in the form of printed vouchers, the vouchers are redeemed and stored at the redemption locations. Because the vouchers are susceptible to being forged or duplicated, the accounting system must also provide a record of these vouchers against which payment may be made. Accounting system methodologies such as those described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,470,079 provide a relatively convenient and unified mechanism for auditing wagering activity in all of these different forms.
However, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that global tourism has resulted in players from different jurisdictions having different types of paper currency frequenting casinos and gaming locations around the world. It would be convenient to enable such players to wager using the currency which is possessed by them without exchanging that currency for the currency of the jurisdiction in which the casino or gaming location is located and also to permit them to wager the type of currency with which they are familiar and thus make them more comfortable with the amount being wagered.
Therefore, there is a need for a more fully generalized game currency acceptance and monitoring and accounting system that maintains audit trails of gaming activity independent of the type of gaming machine and the forms of monetary value accommodated by the gaming machine and keeps accurate game accounting data. More specifically, there is a need for a game currency acceptance and monitoring and accounting system that can accept paper currencies issued by various jurisdictions and can accurately calculate the payout and game win percentage based on accounting data for all varieties of gaming machines which accept such currencies issued by various jurisdictions.